Vision (What's wrong with Marr's model)

[Peter Cariani]

Stephen Lehar was asking:
  "Tell me about the AI vision researchers before Marr that supported
vision models inspired by natural architectures (PDP/connectionist)
with intensive feedback mechanisms (as seen in nature) motivated by
neurophysiological (single cell recordings) and psychophysical (perceptual
illusions) data, making testable hypotheses (reproducing the illusions)
about natural vision. I haven't heard about them."

I think the 1947 paper of Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch "How we know
universals: the preception of auditory and visual forms." in the
Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics (9:127-147) easily fits all of the
criteria a full two decades before Marr. I would wager there are many 
more of these earlier models which have been forgotten by the current
connectionist discussions. Looking back on the cybernetics literature
of the 1940's and 50's (particularly the Macie conferences), I always
have the feeling that they seriously considered many more different types
of neural mechanisms (analog, temporal codes as well as digital ones)
than we do. Just because our research communities have short memory spans
doesn't mean that alot of deep thinking (and modeling) didn't happen 
before the late 1960's. 

Peter Cariani